[ale] HTML Mail (was: Re: ink expired?!?!?)

[Pete Hardie]

On 1/12/07, Michael B. Trausch <fd0man at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  On Fri, 2007-01-12 at 16:30 -0500, Jim Popovitch wrote:
>
> Perhaps it wasn't the mfgs attempt to screw their customers, but ratheran effort to reduce support costs involved with folks who only printed afew pages here and there, then 2 years later complained that ink fromtheir original ink cartridge had dried and clogged the printer head.  Iwould bet that if you read up on ink cartridges there is probably somenotes on recommended usable life span, after all they do come in somepretty environmentally protected packaging and probably can sit aroundopen for decades.
> BTW, What is up with all the HTML emails these days?
>
>
> That is probably a good question.  There is a great deal of argument both
> for and against HTML mails, and I wouldn't use it at all if Evolution was
> bad at building the text/plain message component when sending messages that
> are text/html.
>
> That having been said, I am using it because it is easier to use one style
> for writing mail rather than two.  My school forums and e-mail require the
> usage of HTML mail.  Now, while I don't agree with the *way* that everyone
> uses HTML mail, I can see that there are merits to using it, and every day
> that goes by, bandwidth becomes less and less expensive.  I used to be
> opposed to HTML mail because of its more than doubling the size of a
> message, because at that time, most people joining the Internet were using
> messages without MIME and thus using text/plain for their mail.  Then again,
> that was also a time with ASCII and the various ISO-8859 encodings were the
> end-all, be-all, and more often than not it was plain ASCII.
>
> Today, though, I don't see much of a reason to *not* use HTML mail, at
> least if one isn't using a brain-dead client to compose it.  Evolution at
> least attaches a text/plain section that uses the standard old formatting
> rules for text messages to create the effects of *bold* and *italic* and *
> underline* for people who prefer to read the text/plain section of the
> e-mail, as I recall.  HTML has become something of a standard itself with
> more than just the World Wide Web, as well; it is used in instant messaging
> clients and in the mail clients that the majority of the world uses.  Before
> I started with school and had a strict requirement to use HTML messages
> there, I also found that people seemed to respond better to HTML messages.
> Probably because they can be, when used properly, more readable than their
> text/plain counterparts.
>
> Also, I tend to use UTF-8 in messages, because I like to take advantage of
> the typographical and mathematical characters that exist in Unicode.  I do
> recall being asked to avoid non-ASCII UTF-8 on this mailing list, though,
> and so I attempt to refrain from using it when I am writing a message here.
> (The characters I usually use are the open- and close-quotation marks, both
> single and double, the ellipsis, the em dash, and arrows (like ? for
> explaining menu options).  Since UTF-8 is the default encoding on most of
> the Web (rather, most of the web that I use), and GNOME makes it easy to use
> UTF-8, so I use it.
>
> In the end, to each their own, at least to me.  I certainly have
> annoyances about the way some people *use* HTML mail, but I don't find it
> annoying within itself.  Those who want to use text/plain, of course, can
> read the text/plain segments of my messages.  After all, that's why they are
> there.  :-)  There are plenty of arguments that can be given for using
> both.  I think that the world is moving to HTML and UTF-8, in the long run,
> and I figure that I might as well just use it everywhere so that I can use
> my client uniformly wherever I post.
>


IMNSHO, all the HTML mail does is add hooks for people to add useless things
- like backgrounds, animations, and the dreaded color text, which is fine by
itself, but at my work, they discourage use of the color printer, and so I
can't *see* the neat red or blue highlights if I print out the message.



-- 
Pete Hardie
--------
Better Living Through Bitmaps
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